The Blinded Man
Bad Blood
To the Top of the Mountain
Europa Blues
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Epub ISBN: 9781473547735
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VINTAGE
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London SW1V 2SA
Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Jan Arnald 2017
Published by agreement with Salomonsson Agency
English translation copyright © Neil Smith 2017
Cover design: www.designbysim.com
Cover photographs © Getty Images and Shutterstock
Jan Arnald has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Harvill Secker in 2017
First published with the title Utmarker in Sweden by Albert Bonniers förlag in 2016
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The aspen leaves are trembling. He can hear them even though he’s running, even though he’s running like he’s never run before, through meadow grass that reaches up to his chest.
Just before the meadow opens out the rustling gets extra loud. He slows down. The trees are suddenly so oppressive that it feels like someone is trying to get through from another time. But then he stumbles, and the rustling sound grows weaker once more. He manages to stop himself falling, but the golden-yellow hair up ahead almost disappears from view between the tall blades of grass, and he has to push himself even harder to avoid losing any more ground.
It’s a summer’s day, the sort that comes all too rarely. Feather-light clouds cut thin lines across the clear blue sky, every last blade of grass shines with its own particular shade of green.
They’ve been running a long time, first down the increasingly deserted road from the bus stop, then out across the meadow. Now, in the distance, is the barely perceptible sparkle of water.
He won’t be able to see the boathouse while he’s running this fast – he’s aware of that – but he knows it’s there, hidden among the trees by the edge of the shore, greenish-brown and ugly and quite wonderful.
The golden-yellow hair slows down ahead of him. As the head begins to turn he knows he’ll be astonished. He has never stopped being astonished, will never stop being astonished. And just as the first hint of the irregular profile becomes visible, he hears it again.
There are no aspen trees nearby. Yet he can’t hear anything except the rustle of aspen leaves, which becomes a whisper, which becomes a song.
There’s someone, somewhere, who wants something from him.
Then they’re standing eye to eye.
He’s still gasping for breath.
Sunday 25 October, 10.14
The aspen leaves were trembling, and even though the sky was dark with rain in that almost medieval way, a rustling sound, just a little too loud, seemed to be forcing its way out from the fluttering leaves. Berger shook his head, suppressed all superfluous impressions and forced himself to lower his eyes from the treetops. The wooden planks pressing against his back, so rotten they felt soft, instantly reasserted their raw chill.
He glanced towards the other ruined buildings, only just visible through the increasing downpour. Two colleagues were crouched by each one, water dripping from their bulletproof vests, weapons in their hands. All eyes were fixed on Berger. Waiting for the signal. He turned and saw a pair of wide-open eyes. Deer’s face was streaming with water, as if she were weeping.
Six cops standing around some ruined buildings in the pouring rain.
Berger peered round the corner. The little house was no longer visible. They could see it as they crept in from the side road and spread out across the terrain. But the rain had swallowed it up.
He took a deep breath. There was nothing for it.
A nod towards the two men by the closest building. They set off at a crouch into the storm. A nod in the other direction: another two men followed the first, disappearing into a murky broth. Then Berger himself set off, Deer’s breath almost a whimper behind him.
Still no house in sight.
One by one his colleagues emerged from the rain, four crouching figures radiating concentration.
Plank by plank the house was conjured forth out of the gloom. Dark red with white trim, black roller blinds, no sign of life.
Close now. Close to it all. Possibly even close to the end.
Berger knew he mustn’t think like that. Now was all that mattered. Here and now. No other place, no other time.
They gathered at the bottom of the steps leading to the peeling yellow porch. The bottoms of two drainpipes were spewing cascades of water at their feet. Everything was utterly drenched.
Faces looking at him again. He counted them off. Four, plus Deer’s breathing behind his back. Berger gestured her forward, looked into ten eyes. Then he nodded. Two men started up the steps, the shorter one with adrenaline shining from his pale green eyes, the taller one with the battering ram in his hand.
Berger stopped them. Whispered a reminder: ‘Look out for traps.’
The rain was suddenly their ally. Its drumming on the roof tiles drowned out their footsteps as they went up to the porch.
The ram was raised. Safety catches of various weapons were released in succession. A dull crash of splintering wood forced its way through the rain.
A deep darkness opened up.
The man with the pale green eyes slipped in with his weapon drawn.
Berger heard himself breathing through the sound of the rain, peculiarly slowly. Time stretched.
A noise cut through the roar of the storm. At first it didn’t sound human. Then it morphed into a sound more surprised than pained. The clearest tone of mortal dread.
The officer with the pale green eyes emerged from the darkness, his face as white as chalk. His service weapon fell to the porch floor with a thud. Only when he toppled sideways did the noise become a scream. It still didn’t sound human. The blood merged with the water on the decking as two colleagues dragged him off to one side. There was a knife sticking out from each arm.
Berger heard his own groan, the pain in it, a pain which mustn’t be allowed to take root, mustn’t stop him. He glanced quickly into the darkness, then turned round. Deer was crouching below the window, gun ready, torch out, her brown eyes bright and lucid.
‘Trap,’ she whispered.
‘Too late, again,’ he heard himself say as he made his way inside.
The mechanism was mounted on the wall of the hall. It had fired blades at a specific height, in a specific direction. Deer shone her torch to the left, towards a half-open door. Probably the living room.
The screaming out on the porch had risen to pain now, no longer pure, astonished dread. There was, paradoxically, something hopeful about it. It was the scream of a man who believed he was going to survive after all.
Berger gestured to two officers behind, pointing them up the staircase to the right.
His colleagues set off upstairs, beams of light playing briefly on the ceiling above the stairs, then everything was dark again. Berger and Deer turned slowly back to the half-open door to their left.
Out with mirrors, to check for traps. All clear. Berger slipped into the darkness first, followed by Deer, as they covered each other. The weak torchlight revealed a bare, spartan living room, a clinical little bedroom, an equally scrubbed kitchen. No smell at all.
The kitchen extinguished the last hope. So clean.
And so empty.
They went back out into the hall as the two officers were coming down the stairs. The first merely shook his head.
It was lighter in the hall now. The wounded man was no longer screaming, just whimpering. Two long, thin knife blades without handles lay on the decking. The rain had washed the blood from them, from the whole porch.
So clean.
Berger looked up. In the distance an ambulance was heading towards the gates of the large, overgrown property. There were already two police vans there, their blue lights flashing next to two rival media vehicles. Curious onlookers had started to gather by the cordon. And the rain had eased to a heavy shower.
Berger’s gaze settled on the porch steps – almost two metres high – then he marched back into the hall again.
‘There’s a cellar.’
‘Do we know that?’ Deer said. ‘There’s no cellar door.’
‘No,’ Berger said. ‘Look for a hatch. Gloves on.’
They pulled on plastic gloves, spread out, rolled up the blinds. Light filtered in, refracted through the water. Berger pulled the bed out, dragged the chest of drawers aside. Nothing. He heard noises from the other rooms, then finally Deer’s muffled voice from the kitchen.
‘Come here!’ She was pointing at the wooden floor next to the fridge.
He could make out a slightly paler rectangle. They worked together to push the fridge aside with help from the three uninjured officers.
Between the fridge and the cooker, a rectangle had been cut into the floorboards, but there was no handle.
Berger stared at the rectangle. When it was broken open everything would change. The true descent into darkness would begin.
Sunday 25 October, 10.24
They had to prise the hatch open, four men armed with a variety of kitchen utensils. Berger stopped them when it was open just a few centimetres. He shone his torch around the edges of the hatch, and Deer pushed through a mirror that caught the light of the torch. No booby traps. They forced the hatch open. There was a crash. Dust flew up from below. Then silence.
More silence.
Berger switched his torch back on, and could see some steps. He jumped down, his torch and gun raised.
Step by step the darkness grabbed hold of him once again. The torch hid more than it revealed. A fragmented world: no more than claustrophobic cellar walls and low, half-open doors that led to yet more darkness, new, different, yet still essentially the same.
What struck him most was the smell. That it wasn’t what he had been fearing. And that it took him such a long time to identify it.
The entire cellar was bigger than expected. There were doors leading off in all possible directions. Cement walls, considerably newer than the house.
The air was thick. It left no room for anything else. And no windows, not a trace of any light but the five beams of lights that daren’t linger.
The smell grew stronger. The mixture. Excrement. Urine. Blood, perhaps. But not a dead body.
Not a dead body.
Berger scrutinised his colleagues. They looked pretty shaken as they spread out into the claustrophobic small rooms. Berger was in the one furthest to the left, shining his torch around. There was nothing there, absolutely nothing. He tried to picture the layout.
‘Empty,’ Deer said, her pale face appearing from behind one of the doors. ‘But this smell must be coming from somewhere.’
‘This cellar’s asymmetrical,’ Berger said, putting his hand to the wall. ‘There’s another room. Where?’
‘Spread out,’ he said from one of the doorways. ‘Search along the left wall. Differences in colour, texture, anything at all.’
He returned to the far left room. The cement looked uniform, nothing that stood out in any way. Berger hit the wall, a short, sharp uppercut. The plastic glove broke, and with it the skin of his knuckles.
‘I think we’ve got it,’ he heard Deer say from somewhere.
Berger shook his hand and walked out. Deer was crouched in the corner of a room on the right, as one of the police officers lit it with a shaky beam.
‘Something’s different here, isn’t it?’ Deer asked.
Berger inspected the wall. In the far corner there was a square half-metre where there might have been a tiny shift in colour. Footsteps heading down into the cellar. One of the officers appeared with the battering ram in his hand.
Berger stopped him. Asked them all to point their torches at the change in colour. He got his mobile phone out and took a picture. Then he nodded.
The room was too cramped, too low, for a decent swing. Even so, the black cylinder broke through at once. Berger felt the wall. Plasterboard, nothing more. He nodded, and the ram swung back and forth a couple more times, opening a rectangle in the wall. Then it struck thick concrete. That was as big as the hole would get for now.
The hole into the abyss.
The mirror that was poked through revealed nothing but darkness. Berger could see that Deer knew it was up to her. She would be able to get through most easily. She turned to look at him. There was fear in her eyes.
‘Just be careful,’ he said, as gently as possible.
Deer shuddered. Then she kneeled down, ducked her head and slid in, with surprising ease.
Time passed. More than was necessary.
A flash of terror struck Berger. A feeling that Deer had disappeared, that he had sent her into hell defenceless.
Then a groan emerged from the opening, a restrained whimper.
Berger stared at the officers. They were pale, one of them was trying desperately to stop his left hand shaking.
Berger took a deep breath and crawled through.
Inside the unknown space he could see Deer with both hands over her mouth. He looked towards the other end of the room. Across the floor and some way up the wall were stains, large stains. The smell was now a stench.
No, not one stench. Several.
As he shoved forward, his sensory impressions began to fall into place.
Deer was standing by one wall. An area between two floor supports made of decaying wood drew their attention. There was a large stain on the concrete floor, next to an overturned bucket. And between the pillars was a larger stain, across the wall, that was a similar colour, but very clearly had a different source.
‘Fucking hell,’ Deer said.
Berger’s eyes followed the pattern of the stain across the wall. And it caught in his nostrils. Even with the toilet bucket spilled on the floor.
Enough blood for it to catch in his nostrils.
On the other hand, the stain on the wall had soaked in completely. They weren’t just too late. They were far too late.
He looked at the walls. It was as if they wanted to tell him something. As if they were screaming.
Deer moved towards him. They hugged, just briefly. Any shame could come later.
‘We’d better avoid contamination,’ he said. ‘You go first.’
He watched her feet disappear. Took a couple of steps towards the opening. Then changed his mind. He went back to the two pillars, and ran the beam of the torch down them. There were notches in the left-hand pillar, then similar grooves in the one on the right, at three different heights. He looked down, towards the floor. There was something wedged behind the right pillar. He crouched down and pulled it loose. It was a cog, a very small cog. He inspected it closely.
Then he put it into evidence bag that was almost as small, zipped it shut and put it in his pocket.
He photographed the floor supports from various angles. He turned towards the dried pool on the floor. Photographed that too. He let the torch play over the wall that was partially spattered with blood. Took more pictures, even where there wasn’t any blood.
He took care of it all so swiftly that no one even called through to check on him. He was there, sticking his hands through the hole, letting them pull him out.
They made their way up the steps, emerging one by one into a numbing light. They slipped out onto the porch, the rain had stopped. Berger and Deer stood very close together. Breathing freely.
A number of forensics officers, shuffling their feet impatiently, were waiting outside. The overweight head of Forensics, Robin, was on his way up the steps, but thankfully there were no other bosses, no Allan. The wounded officer had disappeared, as had the ambulance. The police vans were still there, blue lights flashing. Media people with cameras and microphones were pressing against the cordon, and the number of onlookers had increased noticeably.
While the forensics team headed into the house from hell, Berger looked out at the crowd. And he was struck by a strange, fleeting feeling. He pulled the plastic glove from his left hand, got his mobile out and took a picture, then a couple more, but the feeling had already gone.
He glanced at his old Rolex. It felt unfamiliar against his wrist, because he changed his watch every Sunday. The hands were slowly ticking onward, and it was as if he saw the ingenious little mechanism tick out each second from nothingness. Then he turned to face Deer. At first she seemed to be looking at his watch, then he realised that her gaze was focused lower, that she was looking at his hands, the right one of which was still at least partially covered by the plastic glove.
‘You’re bleeding,’ she said.
‘It’s nothing,’ he said, pulling the glove off. He pulled a face.
She gave a brief smile and looked up at his face. She studied him carefully. Too carefully.
‘What is it now?’ he said irritably.
‘Again?’ she said.
He could hear the italics.
‘What?’ he said anyway.
‘When we were about to go into the house you said it was too late. “Again.”’
‘And?’
‘Ellen is our first case, isn’t she?’
He smiled. He could feel himself smiling. It felt wrong, there on the porch in front of the realm of the dead.
‘I’m pleased to hear you say “is”,’ he said.
‘Ellen isn’t dead,’ she said.
But her eyes didn’t waver.
‘Again?’ he repeated with a sigh.
‘Yes?’ she prompted.
‘I was thinking more existentially,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘“Too late” is my motto.’
It had stopped raining.
Sunday 25 October, 19.23
‘Booby trapped?’
Detective Superintendent Allan Gudmundsson had apparently decided to perform a parody of a reprimand. The performance made Berger’s stomach turn.
‘Yes,’ he replied innocently, ‘that bastard mechanism probably ought to be called a booby trap.’
‘That’s not what I was asking, as you’re perfectly aware.’
‘So what was your question, then?’
‘Why the hell did you warn the rapid response unit to look out for booby traps?’
‘Fat lot of good it did …’
‘That’s not the point. Why?’
‘Because the bastard hasn’t left any clues behind him. He’s smart, that’s all. Smart enough and dangerous enough to booby trap his abandoned hellhole.’
‘The address was a clue, wasn’t it?’ Allan roared. ‘The house.’
Berger stopped himself saying any of the things crowding on the tip of his tongue. He looked out of the window. The autumn rain had returned and it was pitch black. Most of the team had already left Police Headquarters. Deer was still there, he could just see her face in the light of her screen through two rain-streaked windows set at a ninety-degree angle to each other. The panes were separated by a slice of downpour.
‘No, Sam,’ Allan bellowed, unexpectedly combative. ‘You’re lying to me.’
Berger suddenly realised that could have fallen asleep at that precise moment. He could have closed his eyes and let Allan’s squawking lull him to sleep.
It was probably best not to.
‘Lying?’ he said, mostly to hide his detachment.
‘As long as it was nothing worse than little white lies I was prepared to let it go,’ Allan said in a considerably gentler tone; it was obvious that he was preparing for a crescendo. ‘But the fact that you’re telling bare-faced lies to your boss shows that you’ve elevated your conspiracy theory to a new and dangerous level.’
‘You became a bureaucrat far too early, Allan.’
‘You’ve gone off piste, and to cover it up you’re lying to your own boss. Do you think that’s sustainable in the long run?’
‘What should I have done differently?’ Berger asked with a shrug. ‘Not gone to the address? Not warned the team about potential booby traps?’
‘This is more about what you’re likely to do in the future.’
‘Catch a serial killer?’
Allan’s carefully prepared crescendo tailed off into a long exhalation which went way beyond a sigh and suggested an impressive lung capacity for a man of his age. He probably hadn’t smoked a single cigarette in his entire life.
With exaggerated slowness, Allan said: ‘There isn’t even a killer, Sam. At most there’s a kidnapper. Every year eight hundred people go missing in Sweden, the vast majority of them entirely voluntarily. That’s more than two a day. You can’t just pick out a couple of those voluntary missing persons and claim they’ve been murdered by a serial killer that no one else can see. Christ, we don’t even have serial killers in this country. They only exist in the minds of corrupt prosecutors and overambitious cops. And overambitious cops are even worse than corrupt prosecutors.’
‘There isn’t a killer?’ Berger said pointedly.
‘There isn’t a victim, Sam.’
‘You weren’t in that cellar, Allan. I swear to you, there are victims.’
‘I’ve seen the pictures. And I’ve spoken to the pathologist. The blood dried in different stages, on different occasions. And it looks as if there’s more blood than there actually is. Three decilitres at most. That’s not enough to kill anyone.’
Berger stared at the wall behind Allan. It was completely blank. ‘Unless perhaps she wasn’t dead when she was moved, maybe she isn’t even dead yet. But she will be.’
Oxygen freezes at ‒218°C. Because both nitrogen and argon, the other major components of air, have a slightly higher freezing point, that means the air freezes when the oxygen freezes. So it must have been, if only very briefly, at least 218 degrees below zero in Detective Superintendent Allan Gudmundsson’s office in Police Headquarters in Stockholm, because there was no question that the two officers were separated by a block of frozen air.
Eventually Allan said: ‘Blood group B negative. The second most uncommon blood group in Sweden. Two per cent of the population. One of them is Ellen Savinger. But that wasn’t the only trace of blood we found.’
The frozen chunk of air was still hanging between them.
Berger remained silent.
‘There was a fair amount of A positive, which confused Forensics,’ Allan went on. ‘Is that your blood group, by any chance, Sam? It was found on the walls outside the cell, and on the floor inside it. There were also fragments of skin.’
Allan’s gaze moved down Berger’s right arm. His hands were hidden by the edge of the desk. Allan shook his head. ‘We’re awaiting DNA results in both instances, but we don’t actually need it. In either case.’
‘She’s fifteen years old,’ Berger said, trying not to raise his voice. ‘She’s fifteen years old, and she was down there for nearly three weeks. In a dark, stinking fucking cell with a bucket to shit in and only the occasional appearance of a lunatic for company. She lost plenty of blood. Am I really the only person thinking of the devil? And this devil isn’t some naive first-timer, he’s done this before. Probably plenty of times.’
‘But that’s not an argument, Sam. Evidence is an argument.’
‘Evidence doesn’t just pop into your head,’ Berger said. ‘You gather evidence by not ignoring clues, by following up unproven leads. You trust your gut feeling, have faith in experience. In the end the clues turn into evidence. Allan, for God’s sake, are we just going to sit and wait for evidence, is that your vision of police work?’
‘How come you didn’t know the layout?’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t know that there was a cellar. How come?’
‘The lead cropped up very suddenly, you know that. I asked you to pull together a rapid response team. Ellen shouldn’t have to wait a minute longer than necessary.’
‘Imagine if she had been sitting there, then,’ Allan said. ‘With the correct plans you could have broken into the cellar right away. Then you might have stood a chance of rescuing her. If she and the perpetrator had been there and everything unfolded the way it did, you would probably have killed her. By being so slow and underprepared. By being so fucking amateur.’
Berger looked at Allan. For the first time he was inclined to think he was right. And that bothered him. Allan would definitely have been right – if events had taken that turn. It would have been amateurish.
‘He gave us an invitation,’ he eventually muttered.
‘What are you on about now?’ Allan sighed.
‘Look at it in hindsight. A new witness all of a sudden, after almost three weeks. An address on the outskirts of Märsta, close to the forest, where someone had caught a glimpse of a young girl at the home of a bachelor no one knew. So those of us on duty had to act fast. And a lot of options weren’t available to us because it’s Sunday. The local council in Märsta failed, for instance – and in spite of my repeated efforts to encourage them – to find any plan of the building. The first thing we find when we get there is a mechanism – yes, a booby trap – which is far more subtle than anything you could have imagined. That’s fair, isn’t it, Allan?’
‘Knife blades in the bicep. I have imagined it.’
‘Two points. One: it was aimed at police officers, specifically at police officers wearing protective vests – the mechanism was aimed at the side of the vest. Two: not at head height. It wasn’t intended to be fatal, it was intended to mock us. Tough officers rolling around on the floor terrified out of their wits. And everything was set up perfectly. Our man seems to like precision.’
‘I don’t believe you’ve asked how Ekman is.’
‘Ekman?’ Berger exclaimed.
‘The officer who ended up with knives in his arms.’
‘How is he?’
‘Don’t know. Go on.’
‘The booby trap is the bow on a big parcel. A parcel with several layers, like pass the parcel. After the ribbon we have to get through the first layer, the hidden hatch in the kitchen floor. Then down into that labyrinth of a cellar. Then there’s another parcel to unwrap: breaking through the wall. Only when we’ve untied the bow and opened two parcels does he let us into the inner sanctum.
‘I see what you mean,’ Allan said. ‘But this is all with the benefit of hindsight, as you say. You didn’t know any of this then. So you should have had the plans, so you could have struck with maximum efficiency.’
‘I had a feeling it was a present,’ Berger said.
‘Of course you did. Supercop Sam Berger. In that case, why was there such a damn rush?’
‘Because there was a microscopic chance that the tipoff was genuine. That we could have rescued Ellen and caught the kidnapper.’
Detective Superintendent Allan Gudmundsson stood up in his sparsely furnished office. ‘Thinking things through isn’t your strong point, Sam, but I’m going to let you off this time. I can’t control what you feel. But I can give you clear orders regarding the line of inquiry which is to be the focus of this investigation. And that line is that Ellen Savinger was kidnapped outside her school in Östermalm, right here in Stockholm, over two weeks ago. That’s all. You and your entire team haven’t got any further than that. You haven’t managed to find a single thing to go on.’
‘Which suggests very clearly that he’s done this before, Allan.’
‘But there’s nothing to support that, Sam. Just wild guesses that you are strictly forbidden from sharing with your team. That ban just got even stricter. Thanks to this so-called raid. If you choose to disregard your orders and this ban, you’ll be fired.’
‘I’m going to assume you’re joking.’
‘Do I look like I’m joking?’
Their eyes locked. And didn’t move. If Allan was joking, he was hiding it very well. In the end he looked away from Berger, sighed deeply and shook his head. ‘So what’s your next move?’
‘I’m going to go through the case with Deer, as soon as I can. We need to get back to basics.’
‘You can’t go round calling a female colleague “dear”, that’s just weird, Sam. I’ve already heard people complaining about sexism around here.’
‘Her name is Desiré Rosenkvist,’ Berger said. ‘And no fucking way can a cop be called Desiré Rosenkvist. Deer is short for Desiré, and is spelled with two e’s. Deer as in not an elk. She’s got a deer’s eyes, after all.’
‘Oh well, that makes it much less sexist,’ Allan said, and shepherded him out.
Sunday 25 October, 19.37
Berger realised he was smiling as he walked down the dimly lit corridor and turned off at the pillar that marked the start of the open-plan office. And sure enough, Deer was the only person left. She looked up at him.
‘A bollocking?’ she asked.
‘Big bollocking,’ he confirmed. ‘For instance, I have to stop calling you Deer.’
‘He could have asked me first.’
‘Because, of course, it’s all done out of consideration for you.’
Laughter. Weak, though.
‘Listen,’ she said.
An agitated female voice rang out: ‘Look, I’m pretty sure I saw her just now, you know, her, that girl, through the window … Well, I’m not sure it was her, but she had that thing, I don’t know, that pink leather strap round her neck with that crooked cross, the Greek one, I don’t know if it’s Orthodox, but she’s a genuine blonde, for God’s sake, can’t have any Greek roots.’
Deer stopped the torrent. ‘What does “pink” mean here?’
Berger shrugged. ‘It was vital. That was what got us moving.’
‘Yes,’ Deer said thoughtfully. ‘It was a Russian cross, not a Greek one, but Orthodox all the same. She could have seen that in the media. But not the fact that the leather strap was pink, that’s never been made public. But I’m thinking more about, I don’t know, proximity. How close would you have to stand to see that a strap round someone’s neck is pink?’
‘She wasn’t standing anywhere,’ Berger said. ‘Because she doesn’t exist.’
Deer looked at him for a few moments, then restarted the audio file: ‘Yes, er, the address. It’s the last house up by the edge of the forest, the derelict one. I don’t remember the name of the road, but the guy who lives there’s a real weirdo, you never see him and if you do he hurries away. He could easily have …’
Deer stopped the playback. ‘Then of course she remembers the name of the road and gives us a full address. Forensics estimate that it’s been at least two days since the cellar was emptied, probably longer. So this witness can’t have seen Ellen through the window this morning. The woman claimed to live nearby, and there really is a Lina Vikström at the address she gave. The reason we haven’t been able to get hold of Lina Vikström is that she’s travelling in south-east Asia. One of those get-in-touch-with-your-real-self holidays without a mobile. Lots of yoga.’
‘Really?’ Berger said. ‘That’s new.’
‘Claiming to be this unreachable Lina Vikström suggests in-depth knowledge of the area.’
‘And rather more than that, actually.’
‘Obviously this raises a number of fundamental questions,’ Deer said. ‘Is there a female accomplice? Is this witness’s voice actually the kidnapper’s, run through a voice changer? Or is our perpetrator in fact a woman?’
‘Nothing from the audio experts?’
‘Not yet, no. But if we’re dealing with some sort of distortion device, these days there’s a chance of recovering the original voice.’
‘I’m not holding out much hope of that,’ Berger said. ‘If Forensics did manage to come up with the original voice, that would be a deception as well. One way or another. He only leaves clues that he wants to leave. If they fulfil a function.’
‘No woman involved, then?’
‘That’s my guess. He’s working alone.’
‘But he’s done it before? You got there “too late again”?’
Berger bit his tongue. He twisted Deer’s desk lamp so that it shone on the nearby whiteboard. It contained the entire case. Which wasn’t much. Almost three weeks and not a single decent lead; Allan had been right about that. But they did have a jumble of dead ends.
Purely because they refused to see the case from a historical perspective.
Berger moved the beam of light across the confusion of Post-it notes, photographs, receipts, documents, drawings and arrows. It was all manual, old-fashioned, no gadgets. The dull cone of light came to rest on two pencil drawings.
Deer pointed at the photofit on the right. ‘We’ve had this one since day one. A man in a van seen outside Ellen Savinger’s school in Östermalm, just before the end of the school day. Two independent witnesses agree on this likeness. And then this more recent picture, produced by a neighbour in Märsta, the only person so far to have seen the “weirdo” on the edge of the forest.’
‘And what conclusions do you draw?’ Berger asked.
‘If it’s the same man, his face doesn’t have any distinguishing features. This is just a standard picture of a white man of about forty. On the other hand, it does give us an age and ethnicity. Although it has to be said, neither of those comes as much of a surprise.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Nothing else,’ Deer said, shaking her head.
‘Does he look like a novice?’
‘It’s hard to say.’
‘If this is the right person, then he’s done it before, I know you can see that too, Deer. It’s written all over his face.’
‘You really are piling up the sort of firm evidence that Allan loves. So tell me, what have you been keeping to yourself while you’ve been conducting an entirely separate investigation?’
Followed by that Bambi look.
Berger was well aware that rather than a sign of weakness it was actually one of Deer’s greatest assets.
‘Allan expressly forbade me from discussing that,’ he said. ‘And our investigation is covering all lines of inquiry supported by the evidence.’
‘Since when do you care what Allan says?’
‘Since he threatened to fire me.’
They exchanged a glance in the gloom. Deer pulled a face as Berger aimed the lamp so that it was shining on the latest photofit picture.
‘Erik Johansson?’ he said, putting his finger on the picture. ‘The most common name in Sweden.’
‘That’s the name on the rental agreement for the house in Märsta, yes,’ Deer said. ‘The estate agent has never met the tenant. The house is owned by some Swedes who live in Argentina.’
‘The estate agent …’ Berger said. ‘How does he explain the fact that he’s never met the tenant?’
‘Email. The estate agent claims he’s already deleted their correspondence. That could be true. The perpetrator has had the house for over two years, and emails that old tend to get ditched. But I’ve got a feeling the agent consciously deleted a paper trail. Samir compared the original advert with the tenancy agreement. There’s a difference of three thousand kronor per month. Our perpetrator probably added the three thousand to avoid having to show his face. The estate agent has no scruples about pocketing the difference before transferring the rest to Argentina.’
‘Can we get anything from the email address?’
‘Samir’s been working hard on that,’ Deer said. ‘And has probably exhausted all possibilities.’
Berger stared at the picture of Erik Johansson. ‘Play the recording again.’
Deer did as he asked. They listened intently to Lina Vikström’s agitated voice.
When it was finished Berger said: ‘If that is Erik Johansson himself talking – and I’m completely certain he doesn’t have any accomplices – then a simple call would have done the job. He didn’t need to act it out with such intensity.’
‘What does that suggest?’
‘I don’t know,’ Berger said, flicking the picture. ‘Nothing good, anyway.’
‘Well being a paedophile isn’t a great start.’
Berger was about to speak but stopped himself and looked at Deer.
‘I don’t think he is a paedophile,’ he said.
Deer fell silent and looked at him. Her brown eyes shone sharply through the gloom.
‘OK,’ she said eventually. ‘That was the moment when your secret investigation went off in a different direction from ours.’
Berger met her gaze.
‘There is no secret investigation,’ he said.
‘You don’t believe in this investigation,’ Deer exclaimed. ‘All along we’ve been assuming the bastard sitting outside a school waiting to kidnap a child is a fucking paedophile.’
‘As long as that assumption didn’t lead us astray it didn’t make any difference. I’m not sure that’s the case any more.’
‘And what’s changed?’
‘He’s being so damn precious.’
Deer was restrained, loyal; that was one of the things he liked about her. But the look on her face as she gazed out at the bad weather was neither restrained nor loyal.
‘I’m an ordinary cop,’ she said to the rain gods. ‘I haven’t got any other training except for Police Academy. Thanks to my Social Democratic working-class parents’ unshakeable optimism in the future, I’ve been cursed with the stupidly pretentious name of Desiré Rosenkvist. Even so, I’m the first person in my family to get any education beyond high school, and I’ve had to sweat blood to become a detective inspector. Can you, Supercop Sam Berger, please explain what you mean by “precious”?’
‘He’s precious, affected, pretentious, exaggerated. He packages his gift to the police as a beautifully wrapped parcel. He wants praise, he wants us to admire him. I agree, that sort of behaviour also exists within paedophile networks, but there we’re talking about hermetically sealed groups. People cross new and increasingly diabolical boundaries and want to boast about it to their peers, get a response, praise, admiration. But I’ve never heard of a paedophile who wants to boast about his transgressions to a wider audience, least of all the police. Outside that closed circle they get nothing but shame.’
Deer turned slowly back to face him. Her face was no longer streaked. ‘And then there’s the whole fifteen thing,’ she said. ‘Ellen was fifteen years and one month old when she disappeared. Which means it wouldn’t be sexual assault of a child – not technically paedophilia, in other words, as long as they’re not related. Which they’re not. We have at least managed to discount the Savinger family. That’s something we’ve achieved, anyway.’
‘Perhaps we could try thinking of it as an alternative hypothesis. That there could be other motives besides the two obvious ones, a ransom – which he hasn’t demanded – or paedophilia.’
‘Maybe,’ Deer conceded.
As Berger started to gather his things together from the next desk, Deer’s phone rang. She didn’t say much, and the conversation was over in twenty seconds.
‘Forensics have finished with the house,’ she reported. ‘No fingerprints, no traces of DNA apart from the blood. Disgustingly clean, according to Robin.’
‘Scrubbed clean,’ Berger nodded. ‘Shouldn’t you be home with your family now?’
‘Johnny and Lykke are at the cinema with Grandma. I’m out on licence. Beer?’
‘Tempting,’ Berger said. ‘But I actually had a couple of small jobs in mind.’
‘For me, presumably,’ Deer said with a wry smile. ‘While Supercop Sam Berger heads off on yet another dodgy internet date.’
Berger snorted. He wasn’t sure if it was a laugh. ‘There’s been one,’ he said. ‘Just one. A first stumbling step. And yes, it was a bit dodgy.’
‘What was it Madame X wanted to do, again?’
‘You just want to make me say it out loud.’
‘Oddly enough, it just gets funnier every time you say it.’
Berger tried not to smile and shook his head as he pulled his rucksack closed over the bulky files. Then he looked up at Deer not even a hint of a smile on his face.
‘You were the first person into that cell in the basement. How much blood would you say there was?’
Deer’s smile faded.
‘A lot,’ she said. ‘Back at the house I said I thought Ellen was alive. But I don’t know if I was just trying to console you, console both of us.’
‘An educated guess, then?’
‘I don’t know. Two litres?’
‘According to the pathologist’s preliminary evaluation, it was no more than three decilitres. First: a bit of homework. What would be the point of pumping Ellen Savinger full of blood thinners?’
Deer nodded, with a frown.
‘And my second job?’
‘You can do that one right now. Which hospital is Ekman in?’
‘Ekman?’
‘It would be useful to have a first name as well.’
Sunday 25 October, 21.54
Berger walked through the rain, all the way from Södermalm Hospital. It was strangely restorative, as if the walk were rinsing all the crap away. The grim darkness of the autumn night competed with the weakly illuminated softness of Södermalm, and somewhere in the tension between them was where the act of cleansing happened. As he took the last few steps over the brow of the hill on Bondegatan and turned into Ploggatan, it really did feel like he’d been given an opportunity to start again.
It didn’t feel anything like the way it usually did when he tumbled into the lift and was carried up four floors. Not the way it had recently. For over two years. Could that really be called recently?
As always, the front door announced that Lindström & Berger lived there. The fact that it still said that wasn’t because of inertia, but because it would have felt even more hopeless to walk in through a doorway bearing the name Berger alone. So it was still there; he told himself it was an active choice.
He stepped into the valley of the shadow of death. He stopped on the hall mat with his whole body dripping. He could feel water trickling down his face, neck, ears, scurrying downward. It was like his whole body was weeping.
The damp chill had time to eat its way into him before he made his way to the bathroom. He pulled off his wet clothes and dropped them in the bath. Even his underpants were wet, and he was left standing naked in front of the mirror, towelling himself off.
Then he caught sight of himself in the mirror. That stopped him smiling. It made the silence of the flat echo extra loudly, a flat that had once received complaints from neighbours trying to sleep.
After picking up the post and his rucksack from the hall floor and grabbing a pair of underpants, he took another look at himself; it seemed somehow inevitable. This time, in the gloom of the hall, the sight was forgiving enough for him to feel like lingering on it. That was a delusion he always regretted. The full-length mirror in the hall showed a dishevelled, brown-haired character with a bit of stubble and traces of grey in both beard and hair. No baldness yet, though, thankfully. Apart from a slight protuberance than was the beginning of a pot belly, possibly even a beer gut, the tall, hairless, nearly forty-year-old male body looked relatively intact, with one exception. And that was only visible on closer inspection. There was a depression in his upper left arm, and when he ran his fingers over the edges of the five-centimetre-wide crater, the skin was just as insensitive to touch as usual. A dead patch on his body. Untouchable.
He walked closer to the mirror to defeat the gloom. When he got close enough he could see that something was trickling below the crater, like red, glowing lava down the side of a volcano. A brief second of horror was followed by the realisation that the blood was coming from his fingers. He tore the bandage off and wiped the stubbornly bleeding right knuckles with the white parts of the bandage, then looked down his left arm instead. On a leather strap round his left wrist sat his Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust from 1957. Eighteen carat gold.
He looked down at it, took it off, failed to read the time. It was the second time that day that he had forgotten to protect it from the wet.
He went into the bedroom, dropped his rucksack beside the bed, put the post down on the desk, switched the desk lamp on and pointed it at his watch. For a moment he thought he could see condensation, possibly even some droplets inside the glass, but after using his underpants to wipe the face he realised it was just an illusion. The water had been on the outside. He breathed out.
In pride of place on the desk – next to a photo frame that was turned away, presenting its bright blue back to the room – stood a rectangular wooden box. He opened it, revealing six velvet-lined compartments. He put the Rolex in one of the empty compartments, briefly ran his fingers over all five watches, then shut the lid and closed the gilded catch. That was when the feeling returned at last, the cleansing feeling, the feeling that he had been given a chance to begin again.
There wasn’t really any rational explanation. On the contrary: Allan had blocked his way more effectively than ever, and his encounter with Christoffer Ekman at Södermalm Hospital hadn’t inspired much hope.
Berger pulled the underpants on, now annoyingly damp from wiping the watch, and was suddenly back in the dismal hospital room. He wouldn’t have recognised Ekman if it hadn’t been for the heavily bandaged arms sticking out at an odd angle. His face looked pretty much unfamiliar – just one colleague among many others – but as he got closer and Ekman opened his eyes, he recognised those strangely bright green irises. The two men said hello, communicating in clipped, polite – almost official – tones. Berger noted that Ekman’s injuries were lower down his arms than he remembered from the drenched porch, close to his elbows, in fact. From the outline under the sheets he quickly calculated Ekman’s height and came up with one metre seventy-five, no more.
The first officer going through a smashed-in doorway would usually have his weapon raised. No torch, not the first officer, that came later. At the moment of entry he’d have both hands on the pistol, arms slightly bent, usually held off to one side of the body. So the knives must have flown past Ekman’s raised pistol. Just above it. While Berger went on talking to Ekman on autopilot, he figured out that a reasonable estimation of the average height of an officer would be around one metre eighty-five, possibly slightly more, in which case the knives would definitely have passed below most officers’ arms if they were bent.
Somewhere a seed started to germinate and finally took root when Berger left the hospital. It was watered and nourished during his purposefully meandering walk through the rain-soaked backstreets of Södermalm, only to blossom fully now, by the desk in his bedroom in Ploggatan.
Had Berger just noticed the first sign of a possible mistake?
Christoffer Ekman had produced one single memorable remark during their conversation. It was right at the end; Berger was already on his feet.
Ekman fixed him with his bright green eyes and hissed: ‘This is pure evil. You’ve got to catch the bastard.’
A cliché. But true. As clichés all too often are.
He had to start again.
Berger went over to his bed and lay down. He piled the pillows up against the wall, pulled the covers over him and leaned over to dig about in his rucksack. He pulled out three bulky folders. He put the one marked Ellen Savinger to one side and placed the other two on his thighs. The one on his left was marked Jonna Eriksson, the right-hand one Julia Almström.
Start again. Look with fresh eyes. Find more tiny mistakes. Where the execution didn’t quite match up to the ambition.
If a man of Berger’s height had been first into the house the knives would have passed below his arms. The scum hadn’t actually considered that. Berger detected a sudden crack in his perfect facade.
In his head he always called the perpetrator the Scum.
Start again. He moved ‘Jonna Eriksson’ to one side and opened ‘Julia Almström’. The first one.
Then he fell asleep.
When he woke up an indeterminate amount of time later – because Julia Almström had fallen to the floor with a thud – he was still in a swirling world where a fancy school building merged into a load of oily, rattling chains and revolving cogs, where a truck waiting on Kommendörsgatan in Östermalm somehow became a sweaty man’s torso above which a pair of twin boys aged about eleven hovered like cherubs, where an artist’s drawing verified by two independent witnesses suddenly came to life and slowly opened its mouth until it became unfeasibly large, then, as scarily as every other time over the past few weeks, when it bared its teeth and got closer to his bicep, it merged with another drawing and the two faces became one, their features distorted, skull-like, as the merged teeth started to snap all around them, sinking into raw flesh until the faces faded away and were replaced by a bucket of stinking urine and excrement that bubbled and boiled and overflowed, suddenly leaving just a naked concrete wall, with a brown stain that grew redder and redder as it spread, and when the bright red stain covered the whole wall he woke up as the folder hit the floor.
Crap dream, he had time to think. Then he opened his eyes and stared out at nothingness. Or – even worse – into nothingness.